Gallery Hopping: Filling the Blanks with Brett Amory at Lazarides

An assortment of disjointed fragments coincide and overlap in the paintings of American contemporary and 2016 BP Portrait Award exhibiting artist Brett Amory’s latest solo exhibition, “Internal Dialogue,” leaving it up to the flummoxed viewer to make sense of them.

“Internal Dialogue” is exhibiting at the Lazarides Gallery, a former gin palace in the heart of London’s Fitzrovia, which is a haven for artists like Amory and Banksy, who work outside conventional practice and collectively defy categorization.

In keeping with the themes of his critically acclaimed Waiting series, the works in “Internal Dialogue” are concerned with mundane and every day occurrences in modern life. This latest addition to Amory’s oeuvre explores themes connected to our contemporary environment, and how we interpret the overwhelming accumulation of information we are bombarded with on a daily basis.

Also a particular focus is the present-day social practice of regarding the world through screens. Many today experience the world as mediated through technological devices such as phones, TVs, or computers, which both widen our understanding by offering information we might not have otherwise encountered as well as physically restricting their users’ fields of vision.

All together, the converging and conflicting fragments we are exposed to forge a number of warped perspectives that don’t fit together to form a coherent whole. Fortunately for us, our brains automatically call on our unconscious minds to fill in the gaps and make sense of this information, which is what seems at work in Amory’s latest paintings.

The paintings in “Internal Dialogue” call to attention the automatic behaviors of our brain that work to make sense of the contemporary universe. The disconcerting works challenge the viewer to forge their own interpretation of the work, drawing on their own memories, dreams, and thoughts to fill in what is missing from the picture.